Happy Independence Day.

Yesterday was a beautiful clear day with temperatures in the mid 80s. Since the weather was perfect and I don't work Fridays during the summer, Maegan and I went out to hike Crowder's Mountain.

A few weeks ago I took Maegan and a friend of hers to hike nearby Nanny's Mountain in South Carolina. I knew going in that it wasn't a real mountain but just of a large hill, but several different websites claimed that it "offers unique views of Lake Wylie's shoreline, Charlotte's skyscrapers and neighboring peaks", which is the only reason we decided to hike it. I am here to say that those claims are 100% false. There's a clearing at the summit but it's surrounded by tall thick forest on all sides so there are absolutely no views of anything at all. It was a descent short nature hike but we were completely disappointed by the B.S. claims. Don't bother visiting Nanny's Mountain for anything more than a leisurely walk.

So with Nanny's Mountain being a complete disappointment last month, we decided to hike Crowder's Mountain where we knew there were spectacular views from the summit. Crowder's Mountain is the nearest real mountain to Charlotte, a 40 mile drive from our house.

This was by far our longest hike ever - over five miles. But five miles of just walking would be easy. Regardless of the length, this was also by far the most difficult hike we'd ever done (at leat the Rocktop Trail part). Steep, constant inclines on rough, rocky terrain. Often climbing over large, and often jagged, rocks. There were also tons of yellow jackets the whole way and Maegan got stung.

For those familiar with Crowder's Mountain, we started out at the main visitor's center and took Crowder's Trail to the road crossing. After the road, we switched over to Rocktop Trail which was the difficult trail I was describing earlier. Rocktop Trail took us all the way up to the summit overlook where the views were incredible. No disappointments this time. We could see Charlotte 40 miles away.


Check out this panoramic photo I created, covering 170 degrees view (The mountain isn't curved - the left side is looking left and the right side is looking right.)


We took a different way back, taking the Backside Trail down 334 steps (you can only see about 50 of those steps in this photo). When we met back up with the far end of the Crowder's Trail (the trail we began on) it was already three hours after we started hiking, we were exhausted, and we were now only half way through our journey and about to finally turn back. From this point we took the full 2.8 mile Crowder's Trail all the way back (about 1/4 of which we were already on before before crossing the road). This trail was more typical of what we were used to with ups and downs but no steep dangerous climbing, but after so much hiking already we were just wiped out.

Labels: hiking, Maegan